When I caught up with this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Peter Zumthor, last Thursday, I could hear the wind whipping in the background. Zumthor wasn’t in his office, which can be found in the village of Haldenstein in central Switzerland. He was outdoors, meeting with clients for two houses in a little village near Vals, the site of his best-known project, the Thermal Baths.
He was talking on his cell phone and he quickly made me, a Midwestern flatlander, very jealous with his description of his surroundings:
I’m out here on the mountainside high in the Swiss Alps. High up. I’m looking at a beautiful chain of mountains. Blue sky. You should be here.
Indeed I should....Let’s tell non-architects about you. Tell me about your office.
This office is in the Swiss Alps and we are 20 people from six or seven nations. It’s a limited number of people—not more than 20 because we’re working in a familiar kind of situation, like in a farmsted in a village. We have a couple of buildings devoted to me and that is where we are working. Life and working are closely connected.
Compared to many of today’s "starchitects," you’ve taken an unconventional career path. Do you feel vindicated by this award?
Oh yes, it’s great that you can sort of pursue your thing. Do your thing. It gets recognized. I’m not so keen on publishing. I’m not a networker. It’s great that if you do good work, it gets recognized.
When you were studying at the Pratt Institute in New York in the 1960s, did you visit Chicago?
I did. I looked at the work of Mies. I went to IIT (Crown Hall, at left). And then I took a tour through all the famous buildings of the pioneers of the city...I respect Mies a lot.
You have said, "Architecture is not a vehicle or a symbol for things that do not belong to its essence. In a society that celebrates the inessential, architecture can put up a resistance, counteract the waste of forms and meanings and speak its own language." That’s beautifully put, but I want to go deeper. I’m sorry to ask you to answer this on a cellphone, but how would you define the essence of architecture?
I guess it's to do rooms or spaces for people. If you look at the Earth without architecture, it’s sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it’s a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
You’ve said you are interested in making places, not just objects. How do the Vals Thermal Baths (left) illustrate that?
It’s actually built on the site where there is a hot spring. So the water comes out of the mountain right there. I built the whole thing out a local stone which we quarry half a kilometer back in the valley. The building material and the site and the hot water—it’s all there. I have to give it a shape.
It sounds like you don’t work with many clients who come do you? Do you reject most of them?
True.
Why?
I think my work is about authorship. It’s less about rendering a service and even less about implementing ideas of other people. I need a close contact to the client whoever it is and a commitment of the client to go out and do a process together. I want to do the best for him. I need his respect and his patience. I want to work with a sophisticated person who’s interested in a good building and not in my name.
What lessons does this award teach young architects?
I would hope that it would teach them that you can carefully do your thing, that you can be yourself, that you can try to solve the problem, that you can concentrate on the essence of your task, that you don’t have to do what other people expect of you. There is still a real need for good quality architecture, not paper architecture, but the real stuff.
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